The Metroid 2 Trilogy - AM2R vs Samus Returns vs Metroid 2

for the longest time Metroid to return of Samus has been considered the black sheep of the franchise it's easy to see why though since most games on the Gameboy have aged pretty poorly regardless Metroid 2 has found itself in the spotlight two years in a row now with remakes that aim to revitalize this story and bring the adventures of sr388 to the modern era first in August 2016 we saw milton gusty more commonly known as dr. m 64 release a fan-made project ten years in the making called a m2r another Metroid 2 remake to wide acclaim and a swift cease and desist order almost exactly a year later we saw the release of an officially licensed Metroid 2 remake in Metroid Samus Returns together these three games create what I'm personally calling the Metroid 2 trilogy I know it's not a real trilogy but whatever the point of this video is to take a deep dive into all three of these games and find out exactly which part each game does better and why why do this isn't comparing a fan game to an officially licensed Metroid title unfair wouldn't the official title win every time I've seen this argument around and frankly I think it's pretty silly with as much as technology has advanced and with all the tools that game developers and hobbyists have available to them these days it's become possible for one man development teams to not only create games but to create incredible games that stand next to and often exceed those that were created by much larger teams of developers cave stories stardew valley dust and Alesi entail axiom verge just to name a few so know the size of the team doesn't necessarily mean that a game is going to be of higher quality or more fun or anything like that so fan game or not I believe a.m. to our deserves a place right next to every other official Metroid title as an official part of the library whether Nintendo wants it or not and before we really start to dive into the comparisons and just so I head off any expectation that I'll be completely trashing one title in favor of the other and want to say that it is absolutely worth playing all three of these games in their entirety and yes that includes the original even if it's just to understand the context of the remakes a m2r and Samus Returns are both good games that aim to revitalize sr388 in drastically different ways but they're also both very flawed in ways that we'll be going over in the course of the video as for which one is my favorite well I can't give everything away in the beginning now can i you might be wondering why this video was showing up so long after the initial hype of samus Returns release well I wanted to do this video right and since I'm not currently a full-time youtuber it's taken a long time for me to get everything done that I wanted to I've played through Samus Returns twice once on hardmode I've played through a.m. to r3 times twice after Samus returns came out once on hardmode I've played Metroid to a handful of times from childhood up until now and most recently a week before Sam Returns came out and I've taken the time to read and watch other people's opinions digest my own experiences and hopefully give these games the attention and critical eye they truly deserve so I hope that you enjoy this video it's been a long time in the making as you've probably already guessed this video will be full of spoilers so if you're planning to play and experience either of the remakes for yourself I'd recommend doing so first before watching this video and if you'd rather watch this video in parts these timestamps will be in the description below so if you have to come back later and lost your place this should make it a little easier so let's dive right into the first part of this absolute monster of a video [Music] [Applause] all three of these games are so incredibly different from one another in spite of the fact that they're all a version of the same game they all play feel and look distinct from one another and it's because of this that it's not really possible to completely count any one of them out there's good reason though for Metroid 2 to have been remade it really really hasn't aged well it's amazing that the developers were able to fit as much as they did on the tiny amount of memory that a Game Boy cartridge is able to hold in the first place but those limitations are also partly to blame for many of the game's biggest flaws boring black backgrounds grading ambient music rooms getting reused in different areas a painfully narrow viewport in an almost complete lack of any meaningful landmarks just to name a few with all of these issues and plenty more nestled deep into the game's actual gameplay Metroid 2 is not easy to just pick up and play without nostalgia or a guide to carry you through the experience that's where the remakes come in Metroid 1 had many similar issues with playability and questionable design choices and quirks and metroid zero mission came in and remade the game using more modern game design philosophies tools and more mature development experience overall and is now widely considered one of the best Metroid games out of the whole series completely pushing the original game into obsolescence as it was released so if it worked for Metroid 1 why not Metroid 2 but after zero mission was released Nintendo began to neglect the 2d side of the franchise and eventually the whole franchise altogether that is until we got Metroid Other Rim in 2010 a strange hybrid between the 2d and 3d games that critically bombed and sent the franchise back into darkness Metroid was in darkness for a significant amount of time depending on who you ask that period of darkness began in 2007 with the completion of the prime trilogy or 2004 with the release of zero mission and Metroid Prime 2 given the amount of sacrifices that were made to prime threes gameplay in the name of accessibility and wide appeal either way Metroid fans had been starved by the time August 2016 rolled around and Milton Wasti finally released a m2r another Metroid 2 remake after nearly 10 years in the making am to our aim to give Metroid to the zero mission treatment what that means is updating the gameplay to more modern standards with more modern features and abilities from newer Metroid titles such as beam stacking in the speed booster while keeping the overall world and map design almost completely the same with a few liberties taken for artistic direction and a new area or two I remember being shocked about seeing this game pop up in my news feeds because I had personally never heard of it and my initial reaction was more intrigued than excitement I thought that it was just a fan game and therefore it couldn't be very good and boy was I wrong the Metroid community was pretty excited to get their hands on this game it was even released on the day of Metroid's 30th birthday an event that even Nintendo themselves couldn't be bothered to celebrate with Nintendo barely even acknowledging the 30th birthday of one of their core franchises it would have been easy to assume that at that point that they were done with Metroid so us starving fans eagerly sunk our teeth into aims who are which truly is Metroid to zone 0 mission a modern game that remains faithful to the original unfortunately a m2r was pretty quickly hit with a cease and desist order bringing official download links down and forbidding maintenance and future patches from appearing to fix bugs in the initial release but it didn't matter it was already on the internet and eager fans made sure that the game would never truly die to this day it's still receiving minor patches and updates from the community to fix certain aspects of the game and it's safe to say that it'll probably be around for the foreseeable future fast forward one year later and Samus Returns is making waves and generating excitement as the game that proves that Nintendo still does care about Metroid where zero mission and a m2r can both be comfortably classified as remakes Samus Returns chose to set itself apart as a complete reimagining the graphics are now fully 3d rendered on a 2d plane for that two and a half D style new powers were added in the form of a on abilities and Samus has finally gained the ability to retaliate in close range with a male a counter-attack ability that helps her out in combat against the aggressive enemies of sr388 I did always think it was a little silly samus with all of her strength and acrobatic ability was completely unable to defend herself in her own games without explosives or beams I mean come on she's in a totally awesome battle suit that's made for combat it's about time she was capable of throwing a punch and it isn't just Samus that has changed either the Metroid fights have become more complex and boss like the planets story is more fleshed out including the existence of the acid in the mechanism for lowering it there are now elevators it sounds stupid but I was pretty shocked the first time I saw an elevator in samus returns I completely expected the connecting cave systems to remain intact the most jarring changes however are to how the world flows if you take a look at the maps of each area in Metroid 2 and compare them to the maps of Samus Returns the structure is hard to recognize for the most part it's all still there when you look hard enough but when you're actually playing the game it's very difficult to notice the similarities both Samus Returns and Ames who are take liberties to add new areas and new bosses to the game to flesh out some of the weaker bits and to introduce their respective additions but rest assured we'll be digging through all that in one of the later sections of this video so sit tight [Music] with the stage set I figured it'd be a good idea to start with the combat and then work my way outward to the larger and more abstract concepts you know gameplay first and all that Metroid two's combat isn't particularly interesting or quirky it simply exists in many ways the flow of the combat is dictated by the extreme amount that the game's camera is zoomed in on Samus the screen is about seven Samus widths wide and for Samus Heights tall it may seem a little weird to measure the game's screen in this way but it has a profound effect on the gameplay the numbers make it sound like there's more space in the game than there really is but that's mostly due to health in samus's sprite is the game feels claustrophobic and it becomes more apparent as you play through the game and compare it to its remakes most of Metroid 2's enemies are very simple and accommodate this zoomed in viewport they all tend to move slow enough that even if you're moving at your top speed which isn't very fast you'll have plenty of opportunity to react to something you didn't see coming this is helped in part by the fact that because of the limitations of the Game Boy enemies don't even act unless they're on the screen this is easiest to see you with some of the floating enemies that move in a diamond shaped pattern if they happen to shift themselves off your screen they're not coming back unless you come to them it's also very apparent with some of the Metroid fights especially the gammas but there's a whole section on the Metroid fights coming up later so I won't be spending much time on those right now but the fact that the enemies are unable to act if they don't exist on the screen means that the zoomed in camera is as much of an obstacle as many of the enemies and environments our enemies have no means to chase you down and you'll rarely get blindsided by an enemy that you weren't aware even existed at least unless you're quickly climbing or falling down one of the game's many vertical shafts even though the basis of the combat is mostly uninteresting it manages to add just enough to the gameplay to make the exploration more engaging than it would be without it plus the fact that you can find more and more powerful beam weapons as you explore feels satisfying as you're able to dispatch your foes with less shots even though you're given a ton of missiles there's not much of a reason to use them in combat outside of the Metroid's themselves and you pretty much don't want to since it can really suck to find yourself unable to finish off a Metroid due to a missile shortage the enemies tend to die quickly enough without them anyway so it's not really a problem am ii are takes the basis of the combat that metroid 2 defined and enhances it with all of the modern fixings of newer metroid titles where samus could only aim straight up down or to the sides in the original am 2r allows her to aim in diagonals like in super or zero mission it's a small change but it has a big impact on how you approach enemies and not so small change is that the camera is pulled way out you're able to see much further in a m2r than in any of the three games which helps not just the exploration but the combat as well you're given about twelve samus's by six samus's of space for your viewport totaling about 72 samus's squared versus the originals 28 samus is squared that's a huge improvement and it feels very very comfortable with so much space on screen enemies are able to become a bit more complicated for the most part though enemies an aim to are are just souped-up versions of the enemies that are found in metroid 2 the same enemies but updated along with everything else one great example is the pancake enemies that litter the planet they've never really been that complicated of an enemy in metroid 2 they just hop up when you get near and then float down gently back to where they started and am too are however they've become a bit more aggressive choosing rather to drift towards samus as they drift downward burying their teeth as they attack this really makes them feel like more of a creature than its counterpart in metroid 2 all of the game's mechanical enemies are also great examples as they've been improved probably more than any other enemy in the game not so much the Little Neck turrets as I like to call them but the mechanical hoppers and flying dumbbells and floating spike things have all been powered up considerably they're far more durable and aggressive and really feel like the kind of machinery that the chozo would create the flying dumbbells even break apart after a few hits to become even more aggressive and difficult to hit it all makes the areas with these enemies feel more challenging and the power of these machines really fits well with the mechanical nature of the areas that they reside in using missiles on many of these creatures especially the mechanical hoppers is something that I would suggest if you want to quickly aside from those mechanical creatures and the pancakes though none of the enemies in Ames who are particularly stand out is interesting most of the organic creatures are just as dumb in one dimensional as they are in the original the frogs just hop around like idiots the tongue bats just fly infinitely in their circles the spiky fliers just persist in their diamond shape until the end of time they don't feel alive this kind of behavior would make perfect sense for those mechanical creatures that I mentioned since they're operated by computers and simple repeatable instructions are something you would expect but for something with a functioning brain I don't understand the whole flying and circles forever design I'd like to have seen them do anything else to make them more interesting traditionally enemies and metroid games have always been pretty one-dimensional and stupid you know easy to predict and finish off but even a couple of the enemies in Super Metroid were more complex and interesting than they are in Ames who are even if not by much the key hunters for example just bounce off the walls but when you approach them they swoop in towards you to attack or the hopper enemies that have two different jumping patterns that make you approach them a little differently than you would if they only ever jumped one way every time it's not much but it's more than what most enemies in a m2r have the game really could have used something to make more of the enemies more interesting but really this is more of a nitpick since my enjoyment of the game isn't really affected by this after all they're just minor obstacles to your overall exploration of the world nitpicky as it may be it's worth mentioning since Samus Returns manages to make enemies quite a bit more interesting and feel more alive the creatures and Samus returns are far more aggressive and will actively defend themselves in ways that neither of the other two games could manage it's an addition that increases the game's feeling of being on guard in a dangerous cavern system filled with aggressive species that can and will defend themselves against potential predators and invaders you're a large loud and clunky alien organism that's invading their home and disrupting their lives and while the aggression that these enemies have is a very nice touch I can't help but point out that the enemy variety overall is very lacking by my count there are about 17 different enemy types that's why lumping together all Rhys kins meaning every swarming enemy is the same and every different color of these tongue bats is the same and you might be thinking whoa 17 there's that many and I wouldn't blame you because I thought the same thing when I first counted them and saw that number but you have to remember that includes this sealing fish that includes the sworn spewing flowers that includes the wall turrets that includes this game's terribly weak version of the pancakes all of these can be counted more as minor terrain obstacles that hurt you more than they can be counted as enemies it also doesn't help that in practice many of the most commonly used enemies are barely different from each other every enemy with a shell just kind of blends together until one creature in my mind even the Mojica char those tentacle backed creatures that crawl on walls feel the same as the shelled creatures as do the tongue bats most of these enemies are present in every single area of the game being recycled with a new skin color to let you know that they now deal more damage and have more health and most of them are dealt with in the same way waiting to counter-attack them I think that this is where the combat at least for me falls a little bit flat and makes the enemy variety feel a lot weaker than the numbers imply until you get the plasma beam if you want to dispatch enemies with any amount of expediency in Samus Returns you need to either wait for an opportunity to counter-attack or pull off a freeze combo this is because most of the enemies in Samus Returns have an incredible amount of health for being just run-of-the-mill cannon fodder that comes between you and your destination so what you end up with a lot of the time is you sit still wait for an enemy to notice you react to the counter-attack trigger shoot then move on with your life with a little bit of practice this all flows a little better than you would think but you always need to stop if you want to get that free charge shot that comes with a successful counter what happens when you land a successful counter-attack is the enemy is knocked back into a stunned state and your cannon fires off a charged shot without you having to charge it up yourself for the life of me I cannot figure out why the stun was implemented in such a careless way if that sounds unfair do you hear me out there's a reason I say you need to stand still to counter sure you can move in counter but if you dare take a step or try to do anything other than fire a shot after you land a counter that free charge shot goes away and you're stuck there awkwardly shooting way too many shots at a stunned enemy that should have died in one hit it tries me nuts when this happens why couldn't the Sun State just make enemies take more damage or the successful counter do 90 percent of an on boss creatures health and damage or something that doesn't completely destroy the flow of the game this is a huge misstep in my mind it's clear that the developers were very proud of the counter-attack feature that they made for Samus Returns and while I think that it has potential to be a very fun mechanic and a great addition to samus's arsenal the clunky nature and the over reliance on it over the course of the game made the feature get really old really fast you'll be countering a lot and of those few enemies that are rescanned and reused throughout the entire game most of them have a charge attack that begs for a counter what we have here is simply too much of a good thing combined with a little bit of thoughtlessness in its design like too much pride went into this shiny new feature what I would have liked to see is far fewer enemies that charge at you for counter attacks make counter attacking a fun event again by not over saturating the game with it additionally lower the health on nearly every enemy in the game this would make counter-attacks less necessary overall and provide you with a fun option if you find yourself in close range being charged by an enemy with a shell or something much of this issue is mitigated by the acquisition of the plasma beam since it's so powerful and pierces through enemies and shells and this is when the game truly starts to feel a little better since you won't have to rely on the counter-attack mechanics so much there is another method of dispatching enemies before getting the plasma beam by using the ice beam and either a missile or a melee attack to shatter the frozen foe but that's not a style I ever chose to use so I don't really have any footage for it I honestly just thought it would be boring and no less tedious than fighting things the normal way after all so many of the enemies have shells that it wouldn't have really worked in all situations anyway and since I spoke about the camera zoom in the other games it's only fair to bring it up for Samus returns as well believe it or not Samus Returns actually chose to keep itself more in line with the original by having a fairly zoomed in screen the total Samus measurements and Samus Returns is about 11 by 4 samus's for a total of 44 samus's square the vertical Hyatt is about the same as the original and even the horizontal has helped somewhat by my generous measurement cutting off the barrel of her cannon as well as the 3ds widescreen compared to aim to R or the originals more boxy aspect ratio laying aim to ours viewport on top of Samus Returns there is about two and a half samus's worth of space that is added towards the left and right putting the cameras level of zoom very close to the originals after all is said and done by itself this really wouldn't bother me much but it doesn't really fit in with the increased aggression of Samus returns enemies there are far too many instances of dropping off a ledge and falling into an enemy you couldn't see you're getting charged by a tongue bat that was just above your camera's view these kinds of situations can make it feel like taking damage isn't always in your control and asks you to slow down a little bit more than you would probably like to and with the way that this game's caverns tend to wind and climb there is a lot of dropping and a lot of jumping enemies deal a lot of damage in Samus Returns and when you take damage in this way you can get really really frustrating I've spent a pretty disproportionate amount of time in this segment picking apart Samus Returns combat and gameplay as opposed to aim to ours which might not seem very fair but say miss returns manages to add so many new features that it's just easier to talk about aim to ours gameplay is about as traditional as it comes with most of the additions boiling down to simple quality of life additions like the Power Grip and the ability to reinitiate a spin jump in midair it's taken a formula than in Tindall themselves have iterated upon over five different games by this point and improved it even more I love the idea of expanding samus's arsenal and capabilities and I really enjoy the idea behind a counter-attack but as I mentioned earlier I find that it was poorly executed in a way that creates an over-reliance on the mechanic that causes it to overstay its welcome and this poor execution permeates into much of the moment-to-moment gameplay of exploring sr388 especially since Samus Returns is so densely packed with bullets spongy enemies with very short respond timers it's because of these reasons and one other that I personally feel like the combat in am 2r outshines that of Samus Returns the simplicity really goes a long way here that one other reason is samus returns free a technology but I'm gonna speak more about that in the next segment of this video since this segment is already long enough and many of my issues with the free technology are much more easily explained in the context of Metroid 2's main goal fighting Metroid's samus's main goal on sr388 is the eradication of the Metroid species it's not a terrible idea all things considered after all with what we know of the species they're very invasive and destructive to a planet's ecosystem and are difficult to dispatch without special technology with this goal you can expect that you'll be fighting Metroid's a whole lot but Metroid 2 wasn't content on giving you 40 plus of those jellyfish-like creatures to fight through and then call it a day know what Metroid 2 did was establish the idea that the iconic jellyfish form of the Metroid's we know and fear are simply the larval form of the species the implication of this paint a picture of a species that is far more powerful and dangerous than initially thought and remember the initial thought was that this species is dangerous and needs to be eradicated good thing Samus is on the job you know I think it would have been a much more powerful moment if this fact wasn't revealed within the first few moments of the game and samus's first enemies were instead some larval Metroid's sure Samus would have to start with her trusty ice beam since that's the only way to destroy these creatures but I think that's an acceptable thing to do and expect I mean whose idea was it to send Samus down to the Metroid's home planet without the single weapon that is known to destroy the only form that they even know about hmm I'm starting to have doubts about samus's aptitude as a bounty hunter anyway fighting Metroid's takes a significant portion of the game in defeating a set number of them per area is your goal that will unlock further areas of the game so it makes sense to give them their own section I'll be covering each one on its own here in probably too much detail and also expounding on my issues with the free aim technology of Samus return since those issues are most apparent during these fights you each of these games gives you the same types of Metroid's in the same order they all start with the Alpha and Metroid - they're incredibly simple beasts they play a little game of stop and go as you fight them they'll inch towards you one step at a time until you sink enough missiles into their soft belly to kill them aim to ours version of these little guys upgrades them a little with a slightly larger brain in some actual combat capability they'll rarely stop to catch their breath and will swoop around trying to hit you with their sharp beaks the most interesting thing that Ames who are does with these alpha Metroid's though is make them smarter and deadlier as you get further in the game as if they've gained experience in combat and learned how to fight as they master the new form they'll start actively dodging your missiles as you shoot and they'll start using a new attack where they back up and then charge at you at high speed their movement patterns also change up slightly and overall they're more difficult to defeat they can get kind of annoying in their later form however since having them dodge your missiles so often can feel kind of cheap and unavoidable especially since their weak point is so well-protected and difficult to hit compared to the gameboy version of them there's even a couple of rooms where you fight multiple alphas at once in Ames who are and it even further elevates their difficulty in a neat way that's not replicated in either of the other two games but by far the best part of the alphas a name to are is that you can actually see what stage of growth they're in just by looking at their sprite the older ones have these comically dangly little legs that just run in place like a little dog you lift out of the water while it's swimming and it's pretty funny but it also expands on the metroid physiology and a very interesting and appreciable way in Samus returns the Alpha takes on a completely different move set and method of attacking they consist of three attacks pooping out little electricity balls during its floating phase that you can shoot for pickups a swooping charge attack that you can counter for a chance to unload missiles into it and an electrified swooping charged attack that makes the creature and vulnerable which it likes to do in groups of three the best way to stop this last one is just to trick it into ramming its head into a wall which will send it back into its floating phase so you can continue attacking it there's a second form of alphas though a more evolved version with red electricity a mossy looking carapace and a stronger version of the electricity poopit tack this stronger attack has the Alpha Metroid drop a large blob of red electricity on the ground which will briefly cover the ground in a zone of damage one of the more interesting aspects of these alpha fights however is the fact that you're able to use the ice beam shots to damage them which gives you a way to win if you run out of missiles and the ability to use charged ice beam shots to slow them down and force them into a counter abode charge I'll admit I didn't really bother with this aspect in either of my playthroughs cuz I wasn't really aware of it as gamers were all probably pretty used to bosses and enemies with somewhat contrived mechanics and weak points for the sake of gameplay but most of the time they still actually feel like enemies they'll still be menacing and aggressive and whatnot but in Samus Returns alpha Metroid's never felt like an actual creature to me they felt more like a weird mini game this comes down to the 360 degree aiming mechanics of Samus Returns in previous 2d Metroid titles you're limited to your four cardinal aiming directions and any combination of those four eight different angles while somewhat limiting on its own it can make fights feel more dynamic by requiring more movement and jumping to line up your perfect shot this extra jumping also adds in an extra layer of difficulty in decision-making by forcing you to ask the question is it safe for me to jump right now will I fall into something that I can't avoid if I jump at this very moment this is a key element of a lot of enemies and especially fauces in games with heavy platforming elements like the Metroid series and it wasn't until playing Samus Returns that I was really able to realize just how much the lack of free aim really adds to the feeling of these games these alpha Metroid's don't feel like enemies or fauces except in the moments where they're actively charging at Samus which is a very small percentage of the time spent during these fights the rest of the time feels just like target practice as the Metroid slowly floats high above you with its weak point completely exposed showing absolutely no signs of aggression these aren't the attack patterns of a highly predatory and very dangerous creature that was created to kill this is the behavior of a bow and arrow minigame in a Zelda title my theory is that these Metroid's were designed in this way because of the free a mechanic and Samus Returns sure this feature gives you the ability to freely aim with having to precisely position yourself to line up shots but while you're aiming it takes away your mobility almost completely because of this lack of mobility the developers were forced to design the Alfa Metroid's in such a way that using free aim wouldn't be dangerous and most of the fights suffer greatly for it and the whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that the free aim completely replaces the ability to aim diagonally with freedom yeah you can aim diagonally but you need to hold up and forward on the analog stick which of course sends you running forward with all of the Grace and momentum of a charging rhino which makes it almost completely useless for most fights in the game let me be clear here I'm not saying that removing free aim would make these fights better in fact these fights would be decidedly worse without the free aim since the alphas are designed so heavily around the floating target practice style of movement that they seem so keen on doing in the middle of a fight know if anything changes it'll have to be an almost complete redesign even though I'm not really a fan of the frequency that alphas in aim to our dodge missiles I believe that aim to our does fights against alphas the best out of all three of these titles and that's mostly due to the way they evolve both visually and tactically they're just so much more interesting in a m2r the second type of Metroid you'll be fighting is the gamma Metroid in Metroid 2 they're not hugely different from the alphas as they'll still move towards you aggressively and try their best to get right on top of you they have more health and a new attack where they'll spit lightning in an arc in front of you while most of the alphas in Metroid 2 are fought in larger and more open rooms giving you an ability to move and jump around to avoid damage most of the gammas are fought in awkward spaces at the bottom of a hole in the middle of a sandpit a two-layered room with a small ceiling and a high up alcove where the wrong move can send you flying out of the room these spaces are what tend to make these things more difficult than they actually are but they can get pretty difficult if you're not careful as their tendency to want to give you a big hug will drain your health quicker than you would expect you might be tempted to fight them at a distance but like I mentioned earlier enemies off-screen don't really act or exist until you bring them back on screen so it's up to you to make sure that your new hug buddy is within seeing distance because of the way a m2r does its best to remain loyal to the source material you'll be fighting its version of gammas in the same awkward spots as in the original am - art gives you more space to move around and see in general though so that helps fight these things because of the tight hitbox on the game is weak point though you'll probably miss a lot of shots as you try to deal more damage than you take during these fights especially in some of the more difficult to maneuver areas overall aim to ours version of the gamma isn't much different than Metroid 2's the only real notable difference is that it has the ability to grab and electrocute you if you're not careful but past that they're nearly identical Samus returns makes the gamma Metroid's a lot more complex than either of the other two games I gotta give them credit here gammas absolutely feel like an evolved version of the alpha Metroid's for all the good and bad that this entails just like the alpha Metroid's they retain their silly little target practice behavior of floating back and forth in the arena high above Samus while completely exposing their weak point for you to exploit however the gamma has quite a few more tricks than the Alpha in addition to dropping Electress that covers the ground and attempting to ram into Samus it shows an even greater mastery over electricity it can blast an electric nova and shoot a bolt of lightning towards your direction it doesn't spend its entire life in the air though because these guys have legs and yeah they're gonna use them occasionally they'll drop down to the ground and start walking around like an insect the game is ground phase is just as silly and gamey as the target practice air phase of both it and the Alpha before it it still has its lightning attacks here on the ground too so it will occasionally use its Nova or lightning blast or cover the surface it's standing on with electricity so it gives you a lot more to be afraid of on the ground it also gives you a reason to want it on the ground because it's final attack is a bite and this is what you're gonna want to try to counter-attack so you can pry open its beak and force-feed it half a dozen missiles the game of Metroid and Samus Returns feels a lot more menacing and a lot more creature like than the alphas did but they still feel very artificial because of their target practice mode and their tendency to barrel forward while they're on the ground heck most of the time when you're trying to bait out their bite so you can counter for massive damage they'll just to barrel through you as if you weren't even there it feels less like they're trying to attack you most of the time and more like they're just attacking in your general direction like you're invisible hoping to hit you all that said I do think that Samus returns does this type of Metroid the best out of the three but that's what the pretty big caveat the game of Metroid absolutely overstays its welcome in Samus Returns not only is it the main Metroid type for one of the absolute longest areas of the game which is area 3 and is just arbitrarily large for no real reason and takes forever to work through but there are a few sections where this Metroid type is used to pad the game's length in a very very annoying move by the developers if you played Samus Returns you probably know what I'm talking about some of the gammas will run away from you once you deal enough damage to them forcing you to leave the room find the next arena where they decided to pop up and fight them again often they'll run from this arena too and force you into a third if this mechanic was used in place of killing a few more Metroid's for the total number that you need to defeat to move on then this might have been better received by me and it wouldn't have hurt them to spread this kind of thing out over the game rather than put almost all of them in the same area but neither of these things happened and it just makes the gammas feel really annoying and by the time I finished fighting gammas during my first run-through with the game I was absolutely sick of them the dumbest thing about this is that there is very often little discernible difference between each room that you fight all the game is in and that just further contributes to the gross gamey feel that they have as you're fighting them but even with that I like fighting them much better than aim to ours hug hungry floaters though I would still prefer it to be less gamey and more of a real fight if you know what I mean the Zeta is where we stop being Metroid and start ripping off Ridley Scott and Metroid 2 they form some meaty legs grow a large and very recognisable head a spindly tail and have little grabby arms that do nothing they still float though which is kinda weird but we can chalk that up to the Game Boy not being very strong and the developers not having a lot to work with they're still very similar to the previous Metroid types but this time they know how to respect your personal space and will float above you and attack by spitting as usual just fill them full of missiles and you'll eventually take them out while aim to ours recreation of the alpha and gamma Metroid's were pretty faithful to the original the Zeta is where this remake decides to start changing things up a m2r takes a look at the legs and says hey why doesn't this thing use its legs so a mTOR makes it use its legs this version of the Zeta has 4 real attacks an aggressive jump an energy projectile a poison spit and a rarely used charge it's not a very complicated fight but don't let its simplicity lull you into a false sense of security because these things are incredibly annoying to fight first their weak point is incredibly well-protected and difficult to hit with consistency second they really like deflecting missiles I most recently played a m2r on hardmode in the original 1.0 version then again on normal mode in the updated 1.31 version so I don't know if it's because of hard mode or because there was a nerf to the Zetas but the missile deflection they do was very obnoxious in my former playthrough they were much more manageable in my latter playthrough but even without the obnoxious amount of missile deflection I don't care for this fight at all in addition to the missile deflection and the difficult to hit weak point another big reason I disliked this fight is because of the way the Zeta moves around the arena most of the arenas are the same they're either flat or they have a small dip or rise in the middle so the creature can jump a little bit the difficult hitbox makes the non-flat arena's pretty annoying and that's on top of the Zetas frustrating tendency to rudely shove you into a wall all the time it just moves in your direction sometimes slashing until hits a wall jumps back in surprise and sprays the corner full of acid spit before turning around walking far into the other direction finally to just turn back around and repeat you can try your best to hit it with as many missiles as you can before you're shoved into a wall and forced to avoid it but it's gonna take a lot of cycles especially if you miss most of your super missiles you could try jumping over the zeta but in my experience it often turned out to be a pretty bad idea as there's only a very small area above it and it's a bit of a tight fit plus there's no weak point on its back so you're gonna have to wait for it to turn around anyway and if you jump too late like when the Zeta is about to hit the wall it's going to jump back into you and hurt you anyway overall I really dislike a.m. to R Zeta Metroid's they don't feel particularly good or fun to fight and I found them more frustrating than anything but at least their menacing right on the other hand the Zeta Metroid's in Samus Returns are far more interesting even if they're a little bit less menacing like the Zetas from Ames who are Samus returns grounds these guys but makes them a little more lean in climbing it spews fire breath spits fire acid and bursts of three and moves and jumps with more agility than any of the other stages it has a bite attack that you can counter-attack for a missile barrage and once it goes to the ceiling it likes to fire six bouncy acid spits and then makes itself grapple able at this point you can pull it down off the ceiling for some free shots to its stomach sometimes it won't even fire the bouncy acid spit and instead decides to give you a very easy time pulling it off of the ceiling even better once you have the phase drift you can activate it after you pull the Zeta up the ceiling and time is slowed just enough for you to destroy the Zeta in the span of one pull down these Zetas suffer from the same gamey feeling as the previous evolutions do in Samus Returns while they're more aggressive and fire shots directly at Samus the whole thing with being able to grapple the Zeta down for some free shots just strikes me as extremely out of place and drags down the whole fight I think this fight is reasonably well designed as it is but I don't think it's a good fight I realize that might sound a little bit like can exceed but while everything here works as a piece of the gameplay none of it is really believable if that makes sense it's like watching a bad actor in a well-written role you like this story in the lines coming out of that actor's mouth but you don't believe a single word they say the zetas of samus returns aren't frustrating or tedious in the same way that they are in a m2r but the weird way that they climb on the wall and turn into a weird turret just to eventually spew some weird bouncy stuff all over the arena and open themselves up arbitrarily to a grapple move that destroys them really drags the whole experience down Samus returns wins the zeta category for me but I still dislike the fight unfortunately neither fight is very good but at least you don't fight very many of them throughout the game after the Zeta comes the Omega and in Metroid 2 they're actually pretty difficult to tell apart the omegas are a little bit bigger than the Zetas but they still float and now they're missing a part of their tail they still like to keep their distance and shoot balls of stuff at you but this time they'll actually swoop in at you and really throw you off your game as you scramble to get in a good position to unload more missiles it's really difficult to not take damage in this fight because the motion of the omega Metroid is really really odd when they're not swooping at you they'll just stay in the air shooting fireballs at you but what makes it weird is if you scroll the screen the Omega will scroll with it these take a lot of missiles to kill and a lot of time but good use of the screw attack will protect you from taking too much damage here a m2r continues the ground locked theme of evolution of the Zeta Metroid and makes them a little bigger a little more dangerous and a little more annoying they're much more armored but they have an extra weak point on their back when they do their jump and lunge attacks by the way that jump attack is pretty rough if you're touching the ground when it lands the immense force created by the omega landing will hurt Samus and knock her down so you need to stay pretty mobile for this fight in addition to those the Omega has replaced the acid breath with a full-on fire breath that covers so much area that you might have a hard time aiming your missiles as it opens up its belly for damage if you get too close it can swipe at you other than the omegas fire pretty much every time you get hit in this fight Samus will be knocked down which really helps sell the size and power of these highly evolved Metroid's even though these guys have been nerfed since the game's initial release there's still a bit of an annoying fight one of the safest strategies both in this fight and the Zeta fight is to curl up into a ball at the edge of a room and wait for the creature to turn around and walk in the other direction so you can start shooting it once it turns its back towards you this is because there's often very little room to jump over these creatures to give yourself some breathing room and many of their attacks will close off that space even further making you risk significant contact damage for even trying so the default strategy for me and for many other players especially the first time through the game is to curl up in an entryway the big problem with this though is that with the right stroke of bad luck one of the creatures attacks can hit you through the wall and knock you back into the previous room forcing you to start the fight over again from the beginning and if you are doing well that really really sucks interestingly I found this fight a little easier than the Zeta mostly because the Omega feels like it's a little more deliberate with its attacks plus if you manage to get behind it and it uses one of its jump attacks the little weak point on its back though harder to hit deals a lot more damage so if you manage to land a super missile or two on that spot the fight is much much easier it is difficult to hit though but the risk of wasting ammo is often worth it overall the Omega is much more of a fair and fun fight than its little brother but I still don't think it's a very good fight like its little brother the creatures tendency to crowd you into a corner with little room to escape just gets annoying and feels cheap if you choose the wrong time to jump over it I feel like this could have been easily circumvented by designing a way to more fall through the creatures legs while it's breathing fire or something because then at least you'd have some options and more things to think about as you fight and while we're on the subject of rolling through the legs of an Omega guess which game allows you to do exactly that the Omega Metroid's and Samus Returns have a lot going on with them and in my opinion they're some of the best fights in the entire game they'll alternate between a swipe with their spindly little arms and a swipe with their me detail or two swipes in Phase two they'll shoot laser breath either at you or in a horizontal line making you float above it for a few seconds in Phase two the laser breath changes to go either from low to high or high to low and this is where it's actually useful to roll under its legs it'll try to lunge at you with a bite which is when you're gonna want a counter attack for a lot of damage and finally it can make an earthquake with its tail causing rocks to fall from the ceiling which is beefed up in the second phase as the Omega combines that with a the floor is lava laser these fights tend to be relatively long but they're pretty engaging the whole way through and the fact that the Omega has a little cage formed around its weak point means that you have an extra layer to fight through and once it's gone you have a limited amount of time to do damage before the Omega regenerates it it's a pretty generous window though so it doesn't ever feel like you're relieved that pressed for time plus once you have the power bombs which you end up finding after the first omega fight a single one of these is all it takes to destroy the cage around its weak point the second phase isn't much different from the first but it makes the creature feel desperate as it slightly changes up its combos and attacks to be a little more dangerous I have two big complaints about this fight though the first is the rockfall attack in the first phase this is just a dumb attack and there's nothing threatening about it the Omega doesn't care to attack you while the rocks are falling and you're able to destroy them with your normal cannon fire with ease add to that the fact that Iraq will always spawn directly above you no matter where you are and you end up learning that the best strategy for this attack is to just stand still aim up and spam your shot until it's over you'll even get a lot of health and ammo refills just for destroying these rocks which makes the fight even easier and that leads to the second complaint that I have and that's that the Omega is just too easy other than the Alpha and perhaps the Zeta if you're using that cheezy phase drift trick there isn't really much that's threatening or difficult about the Omega especially once you learn it's moveset on top of feeling relatively and threatening the fact that you can net so many refill drops from destroying rocks in the quake phase and destroying is chest protection cage which you're required to do anyway means that it's entirely possible to leave these fights with more health than you started with and that any mistake you make can be remedied pretty easily and quickly but even though they're easy fights they are a lot of fun every time and I'm actually disappointed that there aren't more because they are by far the best Metroid fights in same astre turns and the best Omega fight among all three of the games [Music] the larvae metroid is the larva metroid in all three games what did you expect freeze shoot win easy the Queen your ultimate goal on your path to the Xenocide of the metroid species she's enormous powerful and protective and she gives it her all to defend her nest she's relatively simple in the original with only two different attacks one being a face lunge with her mouth either opened or closed and the other is some weird projectiles that she shoots from her mouth all you gotta do is time your jumps correctly to avoid the lunges and ScrewAttack through these projectiles and you'll be fine and while you're doing that unload some missiles into her face if you land a missile while her mouth is open she'll freeze and give you an opportunity to roll into her belly where you can then place some bombs for massive damage after a while she'll die she's pretty tough though with how much she lunges and how little room you have to jump and she does a lot of damage so if you take too many hits you will probably die pretty quick if things get too hairy though her boss arena is built in with an escape hatch so you can refill and try again without dying a m2r takes this fight and pushes it straight into overdrive when you first drop in she looks and operates almost exactly like she does in the original game boy version of the game with some slight differences the first difference is that her head will track you as you move so you'll need to Juke her attacks if you want to be safe the second difference is that the projectiles that she shoots need to be shot down themselves but they'll provide you with some missiles and health refills for your trouble third there's no emergency exit sync enough missiles into her and she'll get desperate enough to charge up a massive fireball that destroys the wall behind you this is awesome what aim to our does with this fight even though it's not particularly complex or difficult makes the final confrontation feel epic it really feels like she's pushing you back with the intensity of her presence and power as the two of you desperately struggle to survive against each other she even changes her attacks up slightly as you move through the ruins of some old shows of structures and even adds an acid spray further in eventually she pushes you back through the other side of the ruins into a dead ended cave with little room to move she gets her jaws around you and then this happens everything about this is just amazing and the way you finish her off is nothing short of epic sure the fight is a little easy with the Queen simple attacks in the fact that her projectiles dropped so many refills but the overall experience of the fight is an amazing way to cap off such a dangerous and powerful species and actually make it feel threatening the whole game builds up so well to this final confrontation and it doesn't disappoint samus returns on the other hand I'm not too crazy about this version of the Queen it's interesting because while it seemed like the gaming nature of each Metroid fight up until this point was reduced with each evolution the Queen brings it all back with perhaps some of the most because video game attacks of the entire game her fight attack in her head slam are the only attacks that in my opinion even makes sense in the context of the fight with the way they function once you do enough damage she has a second bite attack that you can counter for a stun which you can then follow up with either a few more missiles or a trip into her belly to deliver a powerbomb as a trait for some damage on yourself the rest of her attacks are where the Queen as a boss fight breaks down in both believability and fairness the first is her fire laser which coats any surface it touches in a harmful layer of flames not a terrible attacking concept but the fact that it's never aimed directly at you and moves so slowly gives you a significant window of time to force-feed the Queen a bunch of missiles as she patiently paints the walls she does this very often since many of her combos revolve around it the first combo involves pairing it with some acid spit similar to the acid spit from the original game into aims who are in concept at least instead of being projectiles that fly at you forcing you to either dodge or destroy them these float in the air all around the room forcing you into an awkward patch Inco situation that makes it incredibly difficult to move around the room if this was all you had to deal with it wouldn't be that difficult of a situation but the Queen usually likes to combine this with her fire laser when you first encounter the floating acid spit you might think it's a good idea to stick to the ceiling with the spider ball since it makes you really small and you're just mobile enough to avoid the slow-moving death balls but sometimes in addition to her coating the back wall with flames she'll decide it's a great idea to coat the ceiling so now if you find yourself on the ceiling and she decides to paint it it's up to you to find a safe place to drop between all of the green crap and it's not an easy drop there's a lot of these green things and they move around so they're hard to avoid if you have to make any vertical motion you'll probably end up taking most of your damage from trying to avoid these things altogether the other combo that she enjoys doing that involves painting the wall in flames is to paint the back wall and then use her lung power to blow you into it your best bet here is to activate your spider ball to stick to the ground and move towards her to keep your distance from the wall under normal circumstances this isn't difficult to deal with but later on in the fight she'll combine all three of these things the acid blobs the fire paint and the win in my opinion this attack is unreasonably difficult to avoid not only does the nature of the floating blobs make it incredibly difficult to jump or reposition without getting hurt but the addition of a wind blowing you into the back means that unless you're in the right spot to begin with you're almost guaranteed to take damage when these three attacks get combined and the acid blobs don't even stay still they slowly move around their location until they run out of time and they last quite a while another bit of unfairness that the Queen likes to do with her acid blobs is to coat the back wall then coat the floor while you're still on it because of the green blobs you can't use your space jump to avoid the lasers and because of the flames on the back wall you can't even spider ball your way to safety no there's only one move that can keep you safe in this scenario and it's the one optional secret ability that the game never explains the bomb spark also known as the spider spark I don't have any footage of this particular ground to ceiling movement because I never thought to do it when I got caught in this but that's because I never once expected it to ever be the only solution for any boss fight in this game optional abilities that aren't explained like the wall jump and shinespark might be required for a hundred percent completion at times but never in a Metroid game have they been a requirement for defeating a boss so it never ever even crossed my mind what makes this supremely unfair is just how much damage the queen actually does with every single one of her attacks she hits incredibly hard even on normal and with the way her combinations work with her acid blobs you're left with a fight that ends up feeling very unfair for a significant portion of the fight because you'll spend a lot of time avoiding these lasers and trying to dodge these blobs it wasn't until my second playthrough which I did on hard mode that I learned about the absolute best way to deal with this green blob garbage that the queen is so keen on using and using and using the best way to simplify this fight is once you recognize that she's going to blob all over you position yourself on the back wall with the spider ball and then spider sparked into her face when she starts her laser if you do it right you'll fly right into her face which will stop the laser attack and make all of the green blobs just vanish this particular spider spark seems to be a little finicky at times but I found that if you're at least wait until she starts her laser breath and actually hit her in the face with it it works every time this tactic on its own makes the whole fight so much easier and so much less unfair because you'll never have to deal with the green blobs ever again this just screams awful design to me if a move is hidden and is never explained like this spider spark is it should never ever be required for a boss fight and the fact that it's absolutely required with one admittedly rare combo and completely nullifies another in such a big way makes me wonder what was going through the minds of the developers with this fight I will say that the Queen and Samus Returns isn't entirely unfun because it is enjoyable to a point especially once you understand the utility of the spider spark as relates to this fight but it never should have been so powerful for this fight and the acid blob combos that practically forced you into taking a lot of damage are by far the most unfair thing that exists in this game by a long shot and it's not just unfair it's also just not very interesting these are not attacks from the Queen as much as they are hazards that you must avoid during a fight it's all just so because video game that it completely pulls me out of the fight every time with what should be a very climactic moment of the whole game I spent a completely unbalanced amount of time ragging on the same as Returns version of the Queen here but that's just because of how needlessly complex and unfair a lot of her attacks are compared to the simplicity of the attacks of the am to our version even though it's easier the Queen fight and aim to our is by far the better fight when it comes to the Queen Metroid 2 is a pretty unique game even for today with the exception of the Queen herself the game features no bosses other than the few dozen Metroid's you'll be fighting over the course of the game unless you want to count Arachna sub course in Metroid to Iraq miss is more of an annoying mini boss but that's the closest you'll get to a threatening enemy that's not a Metroid he's still neat though as you'll find him posing as an item ball on a chozo statue like the cheeky little jerk he is which is a nice surprise for first time players and for your trouble you get the spring ball but past that there are no bosses to talk about in the original game and even a rack miss on his own isn't worth much discussion however a m2r and Samus returns both decided to spice the game up with a more threatening Iraq Ness and a small host of other new bosses throughout their version of sr388 I won't be going into quite as much detail for each of these as I did for the Metroid's but we'll be touching on each one as I mentioned Iraq miss cha and both remakes and they both borrow heavily from the moveset of the Iraq miss Xbox that shows up in Metroid Fusion Arachne is pre need insane miss returns and you can really feel the weight behind its attacks and bounces he hits pretty hard but if you just keep on sinking missiles into him he'll die pretty quick it's a solid fight if a bit simplistic but fun nonetheless in a m2r the fight is a lot of fun but suffers from much of the same because video game weirdness as many of the Metroid fights do in Samus returns it's a strange little changeup that I didn't even realize until writing this script I mean look at it bouncy perfectly horizontal projectiles perfectly spaced flame pillars a weird sonic style spin attack from the air and spikes on the ceiling that you have to use bombs to blast Arachna sin - that last part is especially weird because how did these tiny little bombs send something so large and heavy so high into the air it's very gamey and pretty stupid if you think about it too hard but overall it's actually a really fun boss fight and that's all the bosses that both remakes have in common so I'll hit up aim to ARs bosses first then finish up with Samus returns the ancient Guardian shows up on your way out of the first area once you clear it it's a great surprise since you walked through the corridor previously to enter the area in the first place and this thing just pops up to ruin your day it slowly closes the walls in on you providing you with a sense of tension as you proceed through the fight even if it's linked to the bosses health it's got a bunch of different attacks that are color-coded and each one follows a specific pattern that asks you to do something specific in return to avoid taking damage it's a well done fight and when I first encountered it it was a wonderful surprise that told me there are bosses in this game this one is just a little weird you grab the space jump from the hands of a chozo statue only for it to reveal itself as a Tori so alright cool paying homage to the bomb Theresa from Super Metroid I can dig it but as you damage it more it starts to get faster and faster to the point where in my opinion it gets to be really unfair until you finally do enough damage to it and it takes flight the ceiling falls away the floor fills with spikes and now you're engaged in aerial combat with a statue that spits out flying bugs cite from the unfair speed on the first phase the Teresa on its own was really cool but this flying section is just awkward it's fun enough once you get the hang of its pattern sure but it just feels terribly out of place compared to everything else in the game almost like it's one of those you know what would be cool kinds of bosses let's look at the tester and no I'm not talking about that terrible show that egoraptor was briefly a part of I just figured this kind of challenge would really turn some people off the tester is a machine built by the chozo that's meant for literally testing their weapons this thing fires variants of your own weapons at you like the plasma beam wave beam missiles and more it's some nice attention to detail and a neat idea but overall it's not a very good fight you fight this thing in a tall vertical shaft and the tester likes to hang out at the top the only footholds you have on the top half of the room are these awkward collapsing platforms that only give you a second or two of offense before you're thrown off this forces you to keep moving as you scramble to simultaneously chip away at its shields avoid its projectiles and find a new platform to stand on destroying any of the hard shields or any of the guns it generates during the fight will net you a hefty pile of refill pickups which will be the main thing keeping you alive during this fight because you will be taking a lot of damage this is basically a bullet hell boss and this many bullets with the gravity of a platformer are not a great combination plus its ice beam attack is absolutely horrible and nearly impossible to avoid look at the way this thing splits what are you even supposed to do about this there isn't much to say about this boss he shows up during an escape sequence and truthfully isn't much of a boss and isn't very difficult he's really just here to increase the feeling of tension as you race against the timer to escape and it does a wonderful job of it as you scramble to hit its weak points as hard and as fast as you possibly can it's a very unexpected boss in the best way and is a very fun addition to the experience of the escape sequence Sarris is a boss and a creature that's lifted right out of Metroid Fusion since fusion takes place aboard a vessel researching the organisms of sr388 it's a cool fight if annoying at times sarah swims frantically around the room destroying blocks and its way as you blast it with missiles first you got to weaken it by freezing its segments then blasting those with missiles and from there you just blast away with more missiles until it dies while the fight itself is pretty cool I'm not a huge fan of the way it plays out it can get really annoying constantly getting your platforms knocked out from under you especially after dealing with the same thing so recently with the tester but if that was the worst of its problems it'd be fine the biggest problem with Sarris is that similar to the first form of the Tauri so it speeds up - frankly ludicrous speeds I'm fine with bosses getting harder as you fight them but this is not the way to do it Genesis is more of a mini boss but an interesting fight and then the less you can find it skulking around the federation ship on the surface in an area that's unique to a m2r the whole area builds up to this fight and when you finally find it it's taken down with just a small handful of super missiles it's a very agile creature with a few interesting attacks that hints to a lot of potential for this creature that simply wasn't realized supposedly this boss was programmed in just a few hours a week or so before the game came out so it makes sense why it's so simple and underwhelming in spite of the buildup but I would have liked to see a lot more done with this guy Groo that covers all the bosses and aims who are I could have gone into more detail with each one but this videos gonna be long enough without that overall I'd say a.m. - arse bosses are mostly alright with some missteps here and there there's a good combination of fun and world building in these encounters and they help break up the monotony of Metroid after Metroid after Metroid decently well and in a very welcome way now on to the bosses of Samus Returns not counting Arak nests digger not is the only non Metroid boss and Samus Returns which is in stark contrast to the variety of bosses that appear in Am's who are this boss has a little bit of an arc in this game not unlike your favorite side character in a JRPG you first wake it up in area 3 and once you do the giant machine will look you over then wander an area for it realizes just how much of a jerk it is and proceeds to trap you into a chase sequence that spans three long corridors and this chase sequence is tight and I don't mean tight like the colloquialism for cool from two decades ago I mean tight as in there's not much room for error in the sequence if you take a wrong step and fail to react to it quickly enough or you stumble on your way through and get stuck or if you simply aren't sure exactly of which path to take the digger nuts gigantic drill will crush you into a rock and grind you up into a nice fresh Bounty Hunter burger it's an instant kill too so if you're caught you're dead it's not exactly fair in fact I definitely say that this chase sequence is very very unfair you're asked to go through a labyrinth with a little room to make mistakes with enemies getting in your way and blocks to bomb and shoot with missiles that you might not recognize soon enough it's probably gonna kill you many times luckily though there's a checkpoint at the beginning of each corridor so dying isn't a big deal in fact because of these checkpoints the sequence can be as unfair as at once and so it's fair except no it's not checkpoints don't make a design like this okay in my eyes it's a frustrating section and I found that it wasn't any less frustrating and my second run-through when I knew what to expect I appreciate the fact that being crushed and the impending death is supposed to impart a sense of urgency and dread as a giant drill threatens to pound you into a pulp but the checkpoints completely undermine any of that the only fear I had was the annoyance of having to start the corridor over again because the developers couldn't be bothered to design something that's more fair or skill based than this trial and error section that's basically designed to just kill you I don't like it at all but at least you get the space jump for your troubles the digger nuts final appearances are in area 6 where for some reason it steals a powerup from you as you approach a chozo statue only for you to take it back by force a little bit later this is one doozy of a boss fight and I think it's a lot of fun as you fight it you need to dodge drills moving in weird patterns brace yourself against the vacuum while forcing it to suck up bombs avoid patterned lasers and destroy falling blobs of it's a very engaging fight with very readable patterns that you'll quickly and easily learn how to react to and overall it's quite a lot of fun I have a few major problems with it though first the way you damage the drills is just kind of dumb I mean it's neat that the developers were able to incorporate a minor spider ball puzzle into the boss but this is just not very good when you incapacitate this boss during the first phase it will drop down and rest on it's drills these drills will then spin in a kind of slot-machine style motion and it's up to you to wait for first the conveniently-placed smooth surface to align so you can climb it and then for the conveniently placed empty shaft for you to drop into and bomb a weak point never mind the effects that this would have on the efficiency of the drills and how the drills would likely be pulverized by rock that got clogged in these shafts we have a came to make we can't worry about this even worse if you miss your opportunity the first time you're stuck waiting and waiting for everything to conveniently align again so you can try one more time and this never happened to me but I'm almost certain that if you miss it a second time the bigger knot will recover and you'll have to do the whole first phase again ok but why don't you just jump onto the track halfway through surely that's faster than waiting yeah I thought of that but unfortunately there's a 2-inch thick piece of steel that's covering a minor amount of the drill on the exact plane that you happen to exist on it's hard to see and I jumped into it a couple of times before I realized it was there and it does contact damage for no discernible reason and when you finally get to the top you then have to wait for the shaft to align before you climb all the way to the bottom but here's the dumb thing look at this nice smooth surface at the top of the bottom layer of the drill surely it's no different than the nice smooth surface that you're currently resting on as you wait for your moment nope know that that hurts too needless to say I hate this little segment next problem there's an attack phase that the digger nut goes through where it will turn into a vacuum and suck up everything in front of it now up until this point in the game there has been exactly one type of thing that has anything to do with air moving things and it's the little air vents that suck in your bombs at key points throughout the map and more on those later my first instinct against this attack was simply to avoid it but once you enter the third phase the digger nut doesn't voluntarily stick his head out for you any more for you to pepper him with missiles what you're supposed to do is feed bombs into this vacuum just like the little air vents throughout the game if you remember those and make the connection you're good but if you don't you're gonna be jumping around like an idiot all day because that's the only thing that will incapacitate the boss now eventually I decided to just try it and it worked but many people didn't make the connection or attempt bombs much longer than I did because it's far from obvious which I can only imagine made the fight extra frustrating for those players even better and a mechanic that's never been explored until this very fight you're able to spider ball cling to the floor to prevent being sucked up and getting hurt allowing you to feed the boss many more bombs during this attack and my final big problem with this boss is its head in the final phase after you feed it enough bombs it will be incapacitated but instead of hitting it with missiles you need to hit three key points on its head with a combination of the spider ball and bombs this would be perfectly fine but this requires that the little blue lines are aligned before the bomb will do any damage as you would expect this gets more difficult as you damage more of the nodes the first is easy the second isn't much trouble but the third is a nightmare in addition to waiting for these to align the dicker knots head will also electrify periodically preventing you from being able to attach to it having the head rotating along with the electricity knocking you off means that you might miss your opportunity to lay a bomb for the final hit and if you do miss that opportunity you'll almost certainly be forced into another phase having to repeat everything just for the chance to try again the digger nod is the very definition of a mixed bag as much fun as I found this encounter it's full of design missteps from the player not knowing what's required of him to move on to mechanics that force a lot of waiting but this fight is capped off with one of the most fanservice II little cinematics I've seen in a long time where Samus finishes off the digger not with a single blast without even looking at it and I love it after this ordeal you get the power bombs which are a very welcome addition to samus's are in this game even though it might have taken a little too long to get to it but I must confess I lied to you when I said that this was the only non Metroid boss in the game because there's one more Metroid to ends at the Queen at least the meat of the gameplay does what follows is basically an epilogue where Samus decides to spare the last Metroid as the two of them in silence make their way back to the surface of the planet to board samus's ship and leave am ii are mostly keeps to this air of quiet contemplation and reflection no enemies just an uneventful and silent departure that puts a period on the atmosphere that metroid 2 creates throughout the game there's a lot more to say about atmosphere but mark brown's game makers toolkit video about metroid 2 analyzes this far better than I could so I highly recommend giving that a watch there will be a link in the description below so you can watch it later if you haven't yet anyway this is the boss section and not the atmosphere section so what gives trust me this is important to set the mood for my feeling about this upcoming boss so you kill the Queen meet the baby Metroid and make your way to the surface except this time there are enemies the journey is no longer quiet and contemplative it's just as dangerous and murdery as the rest of the adventure which is in stark contrast to both metroid 2 and ames who are there's even a final save point and then once you approach the cliff overlooking your ship a cinematic begins where none other than ridley himself swoops in and snatches the baby leaving you to fight him as a fight I think ridley is the best one in the game he's a lot of fun to fight and is by far the most dynamic fight as you jump over swipes and fire bullets and anything Ridley tries to throw at you and you fight him primarily with your beam weapon super missiles hurt him but regular missiles just bounce off so most of your time is going to be spent peppering him with plasma which is pretty neat because it allows you to go ham without having to be too careful about your ammo count and it's actually sort of liberating my only real problem with this fight is that he takes too much time to kill Ridley's got a massive health pool and you're gonna need a lot of shots to take him down he overstayed his welcome just a little bit and once I finally beat Ridley for the first time my hands are really hurt you're constantly pressing nearly every single button on the 3ds throughout the whole fight because of how much movement did involves and with needing more than one attempt to take him out my hands were pretty cramped by the time he was finished in spite of how much fun Ridley is in this game I absolutely detest the fact that he's in the game at all it completely undermines the quiet contemplative aspect of the end of the original game which left you with nothing but silence as you walk back to your ship and think about how you've eradicated a whole species it pulls focus away from the entire reason you came to sr388 in the first place and puts Ridley front and center rather than the queen of a highly destructive and parasitic species Ridley and the space pirates were never involved in this mission and never needed to be as far as I'm concerned it's lazy fanservice to hype up Metroid fans and as well done as the fight itself is Ridley doesn't belong here it even calls into question the timeline of events between the end of metroid 2 in the beginning of super metroid because if samus just trashed ridley and left him on sr388 heavily injured how does he manage to get to the space station where samus drops off the metroid so quickly not only does he get there fast he breaks in pretty easily steals the baby Metroid and causes the entire facility to self-destruct I just don't buy that ridley was able to recover that much in that short of a time span at least he's fun to fight [Music] [Applause] I'm not going to go into immense detail about the exploration aspect of each games worlds but there is a lot that I want to talk about with some specific things that really stood out to me the world of Metroid 2 was never very well defined mostly due to the hardware but does go out of its way to establish a chozo history there this is not just the home planet for the Metroid's it was of some special significance to the chozo race what that exactly is well it's hard to tell each area has a slightly different aesthetic but as for each area's purpose well that's best left up to the imagination both a m2r and Samus Returns flesh out the seeds of ideas that metroid 2 left about what went on on this planet mining facilities distribution centers science labs ancient temples there's a lot to take in in both of the remakes each with their own supply of detailed tile sets extravagant backgrounds and area specific gimmicks that help paint a picture of what the purpose of each area was they also both add a whole lot to each area with a m2r specifically adding a completely new area that didn't exist in the original but they both do this in different ways aim to art does its best to faithfully recreate each area with some liberties taken for side paths connecting tunnels in small extra areas for the most part everything from Metroid 2 remains as it was which is really interesting to see if you've played both a m2r and the original on the other hand say mr turns feels more like it takes a loose inspiration from the original world design and adds a lot of space and I mean a lot samus returns takes each area and expands it greatly such that each area becomes pretty massive I'll have a few animations going on in the background that were made by reddit user our QA a3 721 if you're watching this thank you so much for making these they're awesome I'll also have a link to an album with all of these in the description so check them out if you want more time to look at them these maps by themselves tell a lot about how each area is constructed in what parts of each game bear similarities to each other before I saw these maps I was completely convinced that Samus Returns didn't follow the original Maps structure at all but it's pretty much all there just below way out of proportion with an increase in scale and many many more extra rooms more isn't always better though because I really really don't like the way samus returns lays out its worlds there's almost never a direct path through any room it's mostly twisting winding crumbling or otherwise blocked off with some missile blocks or bomb blocks that are placed in slightly awkward locations and it all makes backtracking through the game feel like an absolute chore and during your first trek through the game once you acquire the grapple beam the game will throw dozens of these red grapple blocks in your path that have no real reason to exist other than to impede your progress in an incredibly contrived way contrivance is just the name of the game here the map design feels haphazard and unfocused because of all of this and like it really didn't go through the required amount of iterations to make it feel all good and organic I mean if you have to put some strange air vents at some critical location that can be bombed just so the player doesn't reach an area too early then I think you've screwed up those air vents are especially egregious to me as they serve no other purpose in the game except to stop you from going where the developers don't want you to go you could argue I guess that they're there to teach you that the bombs can be sucked up by wind for the digger not fight much later in the game but this is a poor teacher there are many better ways to teach the players such a critical piece of information and based on how many people got stuck on that phase of the fight it doesn't work anyway compare that to Ames who ARS design we're wandering through places feels like you're actually traversing rooms that feel like they're logically put together as a part of something that's the big difference here there's nothing really interesting about Samus Returns rooms in any area they all feel so independent from what the background says they're supposed to be that it feels like you could just slap any old pretty background on any area of the game and nothing would feel any different and it's hard to talk about Samus Returns world design without bringing up one of the most contentious additions to the game the scan pulse this power lets you trade a miniscule amount of a on to reveal everything on the map in a large square around you item in room locations are revealed and as long as you make sure to reveal any edges of the map it's easy and effortless to find everything I'm not really a fan of it this ability by itself removes any excitement from actually exploring the world because you already know where the dead ends probably are and where the path forward probably is it reveals breakable blocks all around you so it's practically impossible to get stuck anywhere or be confused about where to go now Metroid has always had a bit of a conveyance issue when it comes to its secrets and sometimes when it comes to its main paths you probably know what I'm talking about those moments where you're desperately looking for the way forward or a secret that you haven't found yet only to find it's hidden behind a completely unmarked an otherwise unremarkable wall that you have to hit with a bomb to reveal whatever it is you're looking for video game donkey has coined this as a Metroid moment and I have to agree with them this type of thing is poor design no matter how much I love this franchise I bring this up because this is exactly how a large chunk of the world and Samus Returns is designed people are always quick to shoot down others who dislike the scan pulse calling it optional but I completely disagree with that assessment of this powerup while it's true that you can get through the entire game without using it once I fundamentally disagree with the notion that one of the main abilities that you get in any game should be considered optional outside of challenge runs and the way the map is designed in the way you're supposed to travel through the various corridors and shafts in Samus returns is by finding obscurely place to breakable tiles that are you guessed it unmarked and otherwise unremarkable and this is prevalent throughout the entire game so to play through Samus returns without this ability would be like voluntarily subjecting yourself to a game full of these metroid moments another counter that I tend to hear about the scan pulse is people comparing it with super metroids map rooms and xray visor saying that they also reveal everything but here's the thing first off map rooms in Super Metroid don't reveal everything they reveal a lot of the main structure of an area but still leave a significant chunk of it for you to find and explore on your own as for the xray visor yeah sure it reveals everything but only in a narrow angle of the room you're currently in you have to make the choice to sacrifice your time and momentum to activate the xray visor to confirm whether or not that suspicious-looking wall actually has something more behind it and it's pretty inconvenient and clunky to use those are the big differences a combination of player choice and agency from the xray visor and leaving plenty for you to explore and discover on your own from the map rooms that's the magic of these games to me exploration and discovery it feels good to go out of your way to a place that you suspect might have a secret hidden but it feels less good to know ahead of time that they're absolutely and definitely is a secret there now you just got to go get it to me the scan pulse feels more like it's either a band-aid four batted confusing level design or a crutch that allowed the level designers to not have to think so critically about what they were doing given how much I've harped on Sammis returns level design you've probably already figured out that I much prefer am two R's level design as a whole larger rooms and more direct paths might sound boring to you but having to traverse through gimmicks every single time I want to go through a room gets annoying fast especially when it's time to backtrack backtracking wasn't a thing in metroid 2 but it's become a staple of the franchise and the whole sub-genre that it has helped spawn so both a m2r and Samus Returns implement this feature in their own way they both supply you with a number of upgrades that you can collect during your initial visit to each area but they both decide to lock a number of them behind locks that you'll need to remember to return to after you've collected the appropriate key but only if you want to so in that regard the backtracking is very much optional and isn't required to beat the game but with a game that's as linear as metroid 2 how do you incentivize backtracking and how do you make it so that it's convenient and doesn't force you to literally walk all the way back well here's how samus returns does it as you travel through the samus Returns version of sr388 and especially the first five areas you will be blocked off from many paths by various tiles that you don't have the ability to destroy yet and in the case of most areas you won't be able to fully clear them out until you've beaten the Queen and acquire the baby Metroid that's right what was originally an epilogue with a quiet moment of contemplation for you after B the ultimate boss becomes a noisy prequel to the real final boss and a jolly romp all the way back through the planet to collect power-ups that are locked behind baby gates to the game's credit there aren't many power-ups that require the baby and a lot of the baby gates are just alternate routes that short circuit whatever puzzle is blocking your access to that powerup but there are enough of them where if you value efficiency you'll soon realize that if you don't want to waste time then your best bet is to never return to a previous area until you've collected all the power-ups in the game and it shouldn't be understated just how much is locked in places you can't reach yet on your first time through an area I tend to be pretty vigilant in these games and I tried to collect everything I possibly could before moving on to the next area and that was made pretty simple by the scan pulse but I stopped doing that somewhere in area 4 when I realized that about half of the collectables in each area will be completely inaccessible to me at the time that I encounter them at that point I got fed up and stopped going as out of my way as I was before to collect these things so I started missing more I still got most of them though and without backtracking at all my final item count when I beat the game was a very low 60% if I had to guess I'd say that the maximum completion percentage that you can get without backtracking is about 65% which is still incredibly low about 50% of the items in areas 1 through 5 are unobtainable during your first pass that's a lot that's entirely entirely too much a few would be ok but 50% is beyond excessive especially considering that none of these have any meaningful exploration puzzle solving or execution involved a vast majority of them are just go to the lock use the correct key collect your reward it's busy work and that's it and the most sinister thing about all of this are those baby gates that I mentioned let's say that you know how Metroid 2 plays out before you dive into Samus returns you know that the queen is the final boss and you know that the games been pretty hard up to the point where you fight her or maybe you don't know Metroid too well but you're still expecting the Queen to be pretty tough and you aren't very good at the game so perhaps you want to complete your item collection before you beat the game that's a natural response right perfect normal but if you didn't remember the baby gates you'd end up visiting every area and collecting almost everything there leaving behind the few power-ups you need the baby for so you beat the queen with something like 98% and then get the baby just to have to go out of your way to return to those few areas that you couldn't complete without the baby so you can finish off your collection that sucks and I feel sorry for anyone who fell into that trap it's a dirty trick in what sucks even more is that there are so many of these power-ups scattered throughout the world that they needed to reduce the amount of ammo that they give you so you wouldn't be too over stocked by the time you got them all because of that and how uninspired most of the puzzles are makes them feel so much less rewarding than they have in any other game in the franchise missiles only increased by three and super missiles and power bombs only increase by one please Samus Returns has 80 missile expansions 30 super missile expansions and 14 powerbomb expansions if we were to raise the amount of ammo you get for each you could end up with 48 missile expansions anywhere from 6 to 15 super missile expansions depending on whether you raise each to 5 or 2 or anywhere in between and about 7 powerbomb expansions you'd end up cutting the total number of ammo expansions almost in half but each collectible would feel more meaningful and rewarding each puzzle leading up to an expansion can have more time spent on it unless maps pasted would be wasted by all of the boring and unengaging half puzzles that currently plagued Samus Returns that could also potentially mean that more time is spent in rating and refining the world they have to make it well suck less it might sound like I'm petitioning for less content in the game and I kind of am as it is right now Samus returns feels like it's the product of someone in a suit saying that the game isn't long enough and that the fans will be upset if it doesn't reach X number of hours but while some of these hours are pretty fun and a solid experience there are plenty of wasted hours on this frustrating backtracking the excessively high number of expansions the stupid fleeing gamma Metroid's that you have to fight three times and the very high damage that every little enemy in the game inflicts on you causing you so many deaths and all that is in addition to this point that I made in my original review of samus returns and especially the animation time when you do anything that has anything to do with one of the games many pressure plate systems I wish I was exaggerating but I timed it saving the game takes a full 12 seconds stand on the plate wait for it to descend walk to the save station let it's can you walk away from the save station regain control taking an elevator is about 18 seconds using the game's teleporters and refill stations are probably comparable to these it doesn't sound like a lot but these are things that add up very quickly because you do them so often throughout the course of the game I'd actually be afraid to go through all my footage and count up exactly how much time I wasted on all these tiny little animations so yes while I am asking for Less content I'm also asking for more quality content I took around a total of 10 hours for my first 100% completion run of the game and this is quite a bit faster than average based on what I've read but not every single one of those ten hours was what I would consider quality time wasted by those previous things I mentioned detract from the overall quality of the game and in turn make it much less replayable for those who like to replay their games I'd have been much happier if the game was four to six hours and all of those things that I mentioned were resolved because the whole game would feel much better and much more tightly designed as a result as it is now the game just feels like it's absolutely filled with artificial padding that was a long time spent harping on samus returns backtracking an item collection and I haven't even talked about am to ours where say miss returns backtracking feels forced and expected with the inclusion of teleporters that give you some nice control over choosing where to go am ii are somehow manages to make the whole experience more organic and not nearly as in-your-face my most recent playthrough of aims who are ended with 81% for a leisurely explore everything run with no backtracking and while that wasn't completely blind it was at least a year removed from the last time I played the game I still missed plenty of items and while some would require backtracking most don't the numbers alone 81% vs. 60% tell you a lot about how each game wants you to backtrack same as returns practically begs you to but makes it feel clunky and forced but what Ames who are does is trick you into backtracking on accident in a completely organic way it still surprises me a little bit to think about how well done this is in Ames who are the distribution center is a new area that was added to a m2r and is a fully realized zone with its own little gimmicks and stories that are pretty fun I do find the zone a bit frustrating and confusing to navigate and is probably my least favorite zone to explore in the game but it houses something really important the distribution center is effectively the Internet of sr388 there's a specific room that has a handful of these tubes that you eventually find and this is after going through a few of them elsewhere to reach various locations in the same area so once you do find this room you don't think it's anything really that special until you enter one of the tubes and find yourself back in one of the early areas of the game with one of your newer abilities allowing you to bust out of the previously inaccessible room and then you think one of two things well since I'm here I might as well finish exploring this area with my new powers or why am i in area one I'm going back either choice works just fine and it also serves as a neat discovery and a reward for your overall progress in the game rather than just feeling like a slapped on feature that was added in because it's a metroid game and needs backtracking and they needed a way for it to be less annoying however I do have a problem with that fast travel room and a m2r and it's that one of the tubes in that room actually takes you to a new small area that gives you the gravity suit which is required to progress this can be confusing for the player because if they're anything like me during my most recent playthrough they'll write the room off as the fast travel room leave and then get confused when they can't find their way forward this tube really should have been in a different room aside from that minor blemish the organic feeling to backtracking that this little room and it's connections represent as an impressive and inspired design that works great and ties the world together remarkably well and because the puzzles and expansions are more impactful and the feeling of actual discovery is not ripped away from you by the scan pulls like it is in Samus Returns it's actually a joy to go back and explore especially when combined with the much more zoomed out view port that I talked about way at the beginning of the video and all of that was without even going into how it feels to move around the world because of that zoomed in viewport a simplified walljump that isn't enjoyable or even complicated to pull off an almost complete lack of any abilities that modify your speed the hyper aggressive enemies that do way too much damage and the overcomplicated labyrinth in paths of practically the whole game the act of exploring and Samus Returns tends to feel slow and sloppy as if you're constantly impeded by something trying to move quickly is often punished by a swift slap to the face from one of the many enemies on nearly every screen of the game and because of the sheer size and scale of each area it gets old by the time you're halfway through the game am2 are on the other hand feels very fluid and snappy and the size of the viewport alone makes traversing through rooms with enemies involve much less guesswork and trepidation you have all the information you need to move safely and doing so is simply down to your own skill as a player and with the inclusion of things like the classic wall jump the speed booster and the shinespark there are many opportunities to speed up your movement through the world and a high enough skill ceiling that you can continue improving at the movement alone through the whole game there's so much more depth than aimed to ARs movement and I believe that a deep responsive movement system can carry a game pretty far on its own after all the one thing you'll be doing in just about any game more than fighting enemies is moving from point A to point B make that as fun as possible with plenty of interesting things to discover along the way that don't tease you too much with locks that you don't have keys for yet and you have a recipe for success [Music] there's one more thing that I want to go over very briefly with these three games and it's a little bit of how the story unfolds I won't spend a long time on this I promise but I think it's worth mentioning some of the huge differences in storytelling that all three of these games employ Metroid 2 like most of the games of its time was pretty minimalist where the story was simply a vessel to drive the design it exists as little more than a central thesis to the activities that you will be taking part in over the course of the game and it doesn't even exist in the game except through the gameplay everything that you needed to know was in the little instruction booklet that shipped with the games box you know back when those were a thing Samus Returns opens with a nice little prologue that for the most part actually matches what was in the original instruction booklet it's been refined for the current state of Metroid lore but it's all there once you're in the game however there's very little to go off of the only story beats that you'll get insane miss returns are taken from the environmental backgrounds and even then there's not much the most impactful thing that you'll find is that rather than arbitrarily lowering when you've defeated enough Metroid's you plug in the defeated Metroid's DNA into a gigantic clock that once you've inserted enough will lower or at least in one case raise the acid and keep in mind here when I say acid I know it might not actually be acid it's a strange hazardous purple liquid that the chozo presumably created that fills the connecting tunnels at the cave system under the planet to keep the Metroid's in and the invaders out of course it didn't work and some Metroid's got out anyway so good job you stupid Birds you blew it I do like that same astre turns actually takes the time to explain even if only in subtext how this stuff actually lowers it's always bothered me in the other two games how once you kill enough Metroid's the acid just so happens to magically lower itself I've heard theories about how it's actually caused by the Queen Metroid being telepathically linked to Oliver brood like a hive mind and the pain of losing her kin causes her to throw a tantrum that shifts tectonic plates which drains the acid but if you think about that for more than a second it feels less plausible than magic why does it just so happen to occur so conveniently every time you've killed every metroid in an area how is it that every time it does happen it conveniently reveals the next area it just doesn't add up there's just way too many coincidences and I appreciate the way say Miss returns but it's a little bit of reason behind it there is still some contrivance to how these DNA powered padlocks all know exactly how many Metroid's lie within a given area as if the chozo themselves left somebody behind to count the number of Metroid's that are around and program it into the machine before leaving the planet hoping that none of the Metroid's happen to die of some natural death that they didn't anticipate but at least it's still better than magic within the game that's pretty much all you'll get in terms of the story if you 100% the game though you'll unlock a little selection of wordless pictures that tells a story of its own a prequel story of sorts that illustrates the events that happened before the chozo left the planet which includes the discovery of the ex parasite the creation of the Metroid's to combat the parasite the metamorphosis of the Metroid's into something that shows oh could no longer control the sealing of the planet and finally some sort of betrayal between different chozo factions this final slide with the betrayal is the most interesting part to me because it sheds a new light on the chozo race whom I believed perhaps naively were completely benevolent am ii are on the other hand has a much shorter prologue section but also includes a scanning feature so you can learn more about the planet its inhabitants and learn some of the main story that appeared in the original instruction booklet this feature is completely automatic and optional and has absolutely no effect on the gameplay other than maybe helping you learn the weakness of some of the various bosses it also lets players learn more about every area and enemy in the game and for the first and only time in this whole video and in any comparison of these three games this is where it matters that a.m. to R is a fan game because of that unfortunately anything in this story or lore or log books unless corroborated by another piece of canon somewhere in the franchise cannot be taken seriously as perhaps canon which is really too bad considering how much work went into this stuff still it's a very much appreciated that it exists at all but more importantly than the logbook are three special moments two of what you'll find in a secret area in a m2r that you can only reach once you get the power bombs and then backtrack the first and largest is finding the landing site of both the research team and the follow-up combat team on a new area of the surface you can explore the research vessel and end up fighting the mini-boss Genesis which is a nice little atmospheric experience within the game in this same area is the second moment and it's small it's the little frog cave from the beginning of Metroid Fusion where Samus gets infected with the X the final moment is something you'll run into naturally and it's the existence of the Federation teams that came down to this planet and came from those ships you'll find the remnants of the research team in one area and in another area you'll find what's left of the combat team getting ripped apart by an Omega how they even got down to the levels of the planet that they were in without the acid destroying them is a good question for sure but the fact that a m2r acknowledges them at all is an incredible little detail that really stands out in the overall level design and world building of this title aim to ours attention to the story simply blows samus Returns out of the water with the way it builds sr388 with not just metroid 2 as an inspiration but also Metroid Fusion remember the research station that you explore in Metroid Fusion is something of a recreation of the biology on sr388 so these remakes have plenty of material to pull from and a m2r was not at all shy about taking what they could from fusion and putting it into a m2r and it makes the planet feel that much more alive as a result and makes this fangame feel very much like it really is canon and an official Metroid game and this extends all the way to the very ending of the games a m2r stays true to the atmosphere in the finality of the Xenocide that it just forced upon you leaving you with introspection as your reward as you make your way back up to the surface it even stays true to the scarcity of the enemies you'll encounter as you get closer to the more powerful and developed Metroid's and their queen creating a sense of scarcity of life in the midst of these incredibly destructive creatures in their own lair and you can see the profound impact that the Metroid's have had on this planet and its environment in why they're so dangerous and must be eradicated samus returns though just throws all that out completely enemies are plentiful and feel even more dense as you approach the Queen with the iconic huge empty room just before the Queen in her larva being turned into a final maze filled with enemies and collectibles instead of a quiet climb to your destination and once you defeat the Queen there's dozens of enemies left to defeat as you venture back to the surface loud as ever to eventually face Ridley with all that in the fact that the baby is the final powerup that you need to collect the rest of the items in the game all sense of finality in the mission is stripped away from these final moments of the game and is replaced by fanservice even though it's a fan game aim to ARs world and story feel more definitively like metroid 2 than samus Returns does samus returns by comparison feels like it pays no respect to much of the established past of the franchise while am2 are happily draws from it as much as possible once again I'd like to urge you all to watch Mark Brown's video on Metroid 2 and its remakes because it elaborates on what I cover here and talks about even more I think I spent a lot more time in this video criticizing Samus Returns compared to a m2r and because of that I want to reiterate what I said at the beginning of this video I think Samus returns is a fine game and I had quite a bit of fun with it in my two playthroughs and I would recommend any fan of Metroid to pick it up and play it for themselves even after I tore it apart but for me it's never going to be more than just fine Samus returns and mercury steam went out of their way to innovate the franchise and while I think they did a much better job than team ninja did with other M it still misses the mark of what makes a Metroid game a Metroid game exploration and discovery is at the core of this franchise and the sub-genre it helped create and at some point in development it seems like that was forgotten of course that's not to say that action cannot be an equal partner in this equation because it very well can be look at titles like dust and Elysian tail and guacamelee for some good action-oriented Metroidvania that don't sacrifice the feeling of exploration and discovery but even for those titles the action never pushes exploration to the background the way same as returns does and for that reason Samus returns never quite had that magic for me it's just too bogged down by a few glaring design issues an overall lack of care and refinement and feeling like it's been artificially padded all over the place with all that in mind a m2r gets my vote as the definitive Metroid to experience I could not care less that it's a fan game because it was made with a professional touch with almost all of the detail and polish that Nintendo themselves are famous for when it comes to their first party games it deserves a place next to all of the officially created titles as a part of the Metroid franchise and no I don't mean instead of Samus returns because it deserves its place too again I would recommend playing all three of these games somewhat close to each other for the best experience it's truly great to see how this one game was reimagined in two completely different but still viable in fun ways and you're bound to love one or the other and before you go into the comments and tell me that I forgot this or I forgot that I know I didn't go over every single thing about these games I had to stop somewhere right for example I didn't talk about the difference in the way bombs work in these games and how gross bomb jumping feels and Samus returns nor did I talk about how I think am to ours soundtrack is lazily filled with nostalgia bait for most of the soundtrack in spite of how awesome the soundtrack is overall not that same as Returns did much better with this but it at least takes some of the soundtracks of the original and fully realizes them including the weird ambient tracks there's so much more that I didn't cover but I'm content with how this video ended up but hey that's gonna do it for this video if you're still here thank you so much for watching this monster of a video this is by far my longest video I've ever made and it's been haunting me ever since its inception I vastly underestimated the amount of effort and stress required for a project of this size so don't expect me to do videos like this very often I can only hope that if you're hearing this now that you enjoyed the video and gained something from it even if just a couple of hours of entertainment I want to take a moment and shout out all of my patrons especially MiG a eldest and life--all it's because of you and all of my patrons and everyone who watches this channel on a regular basis and left positive comments that I felt comfortable taking such a huge risk on a huge project like this so from the bottom of my heart thank you and if this is the first video you've seen from me like I said this size of video won't be regular but I do hope that you'll stick around and enjoy some of my other content and hit that subscribe button for more content sort of like this in the future and be sure to follow me on twitter at ingenious clown if that's your thing and I will see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: ingeniousclown Gaming

Views: 89,455

Keywords: ingeniousclown, ingenious clown, ingeniousclown gaming, metroid 2, metroid, metroid ii, metroid 2 return of samus, samus returns, metroid samus returns, am2r, another metroid 2 remake, am2r vs samus returns, samus returns vs am2r, the metroid 2 trilogy, metroid 2 trilogy, metroid 2 vs am2r vs samus returns, samus returns sucks, am2r sucks, metroid fan game, metroid 3ds, best metroid 2, metroid 2 comparison, trilogy

Id: iGHIrL3rOcQ

Length: 107min 32sec (6452 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/PrimeCedars]

I feel like the least played Metroid title is now somehow the most played Metroid title. Metroid II, that is.

[u/49falkon]

These games are just cheeseburgers.

Metroid 2 is a cheeseburger. You have a beef patty with some generic seasoning, a slice of cheese, some lettuce, maybe some tomatoes, and a nice bun. It's good, but over the years, you've seen a lot of cheeseburgers. It doesn't wow you as much as your first cheeseburger did.

AM2R is also a cheeseburger, but it's got an updated recipe. You have a new seasoning for the burger, a perfectly melted slice of cheese, fresh lettuce, fresh tomatoes, some mayo, and a nice toasted sesame seed bun. It's still a cheeseburger at the core, but it changed up some things and added a few extras, and it's really good.

Samus Returns is like a cheeseburger pizza. There's still beef, cheese, lettuce, and all the other cheeseburger essentials. It tastes similar, and honestly, it's really good. But it's presented in a totally different way than the more traditional cheeseburger you'd gotten used to, so it takes you a while to get a feel for it.

[u/ingeniousclown]

Thanks for sharing my video! Gotta shout out /u/rqaa3721 for the amazing maps, too!

[u/ElectrixReddit]

I feel like he was a bit too harsh on some of Samus Returns's problems, but overall this is a really awesome review of how each game improved upon Metroid II!

[u/samfizz]

Great analysis. I had an issue with some of the critiques to Samus Returns's Queen fight, though. He calls the Spiderspark technique required, yet I never even learned about it until after I finished the game and never had an issue with the final boss or felt that it was unfair. Managing your Aeion, dodging most attacks, and melee countering was all you had to do to kill it. It took me a few tries, sure, but not once did I think the fight was not designed well. I just thought it was tough and I needed to master it, same goes for Diggernaut.